Arriving back at the wood-panelled station after navigating Bolzano's empty, freezing-cold piazzas, I waited in the platform bar with a group of labourers who were keeping warm and watching TV before the night train to Naples pulled in punctually at 9.30pm.

On a trip back to Rome one evening last month from Bolzano near the Austrian border, I booked my night-train ticket and had just enough time to set off through porticoed streets to eat roast duck, apple sauce and red cabbage at a trattoria, surrounded by German-speaking Italians laughing and knocking back tall glasses of beer.